GOP Leaders Refuse to Name Obamacare Board Members

Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., notified the president today that they will not participate in one of the more controversial parts of the health care law, known as Obamacare.

In a letter, the two GOP leaders said they would not submit Republican appointees to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which was created to try to rein in the costs of Medicare. Critics worry the board has too much power to possibly cut payments to doctors or limit the types of care seniors can get.

Full letter after the jump:

May 9, 2013

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

We write to respond to your March 29, 2013 letter requesting that we submit the names of individuals to serve on the Individual Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which was created in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148). Because the law will give IPAB’s 15 unelected, unaccountable individuals the ability to deny seniors access to innovative care, we respectfully decline to recommend appointments.

As you know, we opposed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because we knew it would increase health costs, impose costly burdens on job creators, and raid Medicare to pay for a massive new entitlement. In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.

The unfortunate result is that decisions which impact America’s seniors will be made in the absence of the democratic process, without the system of checks and balances that would normally apply to important matters of public policy. Yet your recent budget called for expanding IPAB by tasking it with making even larger cuts to Medicare than those called for in the health law, even though the trustees of the Medicare program have told us that IPAB’s provider cuts would be “difficult to achieve in practice,” because of the denied care that seniors would experience.

We believe Congress should repeal IPAB, just as we believe we ought to repeal the entire health care law. In its place, we should work in a bipartisan manner to develop the long-term structural changes that are needed to strengthen and protect Medicare for today’s seniors, their children, and their grandchildren. We hope establishing this board never becomes a reality, which is why full repeal of the Affordable Care Act remains our goal.

Sincerely,

John Boehner Mitch McConnell
Speaker of the House of Representatives Senate Republican Leader

I don’t get it. Are Senators and Representatives allowed to break the law when they believe that it shouldn’t be a law? Sounds like Italy and Brazil, where elected officials are immune from prosecution while in office. Do we want this?

Roll Call Video Picks

About 218

218 will tell you what the House is up to, and why. It will analyze the effectiveness of Democrats and Republicans and how their actions will affect each party writ large.